Creating a 360° Facebook Photo World

With the evolution and growing popularity of 360°-style photography, photographers and designers can create worlds of their own imagination, allowing viewers to experience it from seemingly endless angles. Sharing an immersive view of your world, real or imagined, is easier than ever with social platforms like Facebook giving fans the option to upload interactive 360 photos.

If you want to experiment with the 360 photo trend or with creating an original environment of your own design, the Adobe Stock library of 75 million diverse and compelling assets is the perfect place to to start. In fact, to celebrate this year’s Earth Day and National Park Week, the Adobe Creative Cloud team created five dramatic 360 images blending the landscapes of two majestic national parks – all in perfect timing for the National Park Service’s observation of National Park Week.

Below, we’ve added a step-by-step guide to outline how anyone can create a 360° image from Adobe Stock content to reimagine a landscape of their liking.

Place the sized photos on an art board and roughly align image similarities. Here, the designer aligned the mountains found in both images, so the scope of field remains relevant.

For this example, two images were used; however, you can also use multiple images.

2. Go With Guidelines

This is where the shape tool comes into play. Here, our designer inserted a black rectangle using the shape tool, using it as a guide to visually see the portion of the image they were working on. From there, they chose a portion of the image that is not showing, placing it on the right side and used the flat rectangle shape tool to overlap on the right-hand side. This serves as a guide to visually see what portion of the image that needs blending.

3. Get to Blending

Begin blending the center of the image by creating new layers. This is also where the Stamp tool comes into play; use it to bring the parts of your image forward that you would like to stand out; in this case, it’s parts of the mountain. You can continue doing the same with other elements as well, playing with the opacity and blend modes.

4. More Masking

Incorporating masking – a part of the layer that you use with the stamp tool – will add both texture and depth to your image.

For these two images, the artist also added a hand-drawn purple haze.

Finally….

Now that you’ve created your 360° photo world, it’s time to share it with everyone else.

To do this, place the PNG into Facebook’s 360° Template and save it out as a JPG. This is a very crucial “must” step so the metadata will transfer from the template to create the 360°. For this example, the artist used pano-template-360-65-6000×1217.psd.

The most beautiful aspect of seamlessly blending worlds in a 360° image is that there are absolutely no restrictions, except for the ones you place on your imagination. Whether you want to celebrate Groundhog Day with Punxsutawney Phil , marvel at a Winter Solstice or Take a Hike in a desert, through the woods and along the shores of a beach – all at once.